I've just been on there again, and it's still happening.

This should be easy - look for the code that says "press return = post comment", it should be a 2 minute job maximum, not a week.

I suspect that it's not a bug at all - nothing so easy to fix would be "worked on" for this long.

I reckon they, arrogantly, are trying to "be FaceBook".

They hope by fobbing us off for a couple of weeks we'll get used to the idea of one paragraph posts, and docilely dumb ourselves down to a "nice cat" or "LOL - cool!" level.

That's not why I like YouTube - which is/was a kind of melting pot of all different kinds of people.

Yes - you have people showing off their cat and posting their favourite bits of TV - but you also have academic lectures and well thought out original content from the arts and science - and even literature.

Now - you're expecting someone watching Stephen Hawking's latest lecture to go "cool voice!" or "Hahaha- he sounds like Wall-E!" or even worse:

"While I agree with Hawking's initial premise about Black Holes being singularities in time, I find several problems. First, what is time? Well, lesser men than Hawking have come up with better answers, as I shall now explain. First blah blah blah - no separation of points, either bulleted or in paragraphs ..."

An involved post like that requires neatly laid out paragraphs and points - otherwise it's an instant switch-off. I know that I'll only read a lengthy post if it's neatly laid out - the "instant skim" feature of my brain can latch onto an interesting word or phrase - and that persuades me within 0.25 of a second to read the whole post. A well presented post has a massive advantage - paragraphs or bullet points are very important.

If this IS a bug - then it's time to sack the programmers. If they can't sort this out within a week - then what the hell are they going to do when your personal details are being leaked to criminals [who have a much better idea of how to program a computer than they do]?

I just can't believe it - I reckon this is deliberate. Born of an arrogance that YouTube is much too popular for anyone to leave it; and a short term aspiration to amalgamate it with FaceBook which uses a similar method of submitting comments. (an aspiration to make it easy to fuse the two codes for submitting comments)

Someday, someone is going to come along with an attractive alternative to YouTube. The same thing - but with no restrictions on comments (and how they're presented), no restrictions on video length, a genuine hard line on spam and no serious meddling by the programmers without popular consent....

When that happens - YouTube, in less than a couple of years, will become a sideshow like MySpace and Friends Reunited. And the new site on the block will be fresh, new and delivering what YouTube once did but better.